Courtesy of the Pilipino Embassy afforded a first MacMahonian encounter with a hitherto unknown filmography, in the guise of Independencia.
Independencia was the 6th feature film directed by Raya Martin, poster boy of the self-proclaimed 4th Golden Age of Pilipino film (the other three being immediately after WWII and two subsequent periods in the 70s and 80s), and was selected for the Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard section in 2009.
Independencia revolves around a family that moves from the town to the tropical jungle to escape the arrival of US troops to the Philippines after its independence from Spain, subsequently engaging in mostly uneventful familial rural/tropical activities interspersed with what seemed to be bouts of magical realism.
A studio-bound production in gorgeous black and white and 1/1.33 format, featuring a luscious tropical jungle off soundtrack, Independencia brought to mind the certainly incomparable The Saga of Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953) but was otherwise inscrutable and soporific. The accompanying note that the Cinemateca Portuguesa, where this retrospective is being shown, never fails to provide helpfully informs that the entirety of Pilipino film production previous to WWII was destroyed or otherwise lost and therefore researchable only through secondary sources (newspaper reviews, stage photos and the like), so Independencia seeks to pay a sort of tribute to the era´s disappeared films while simultaneously commenting on the trauma of US occupation. References to Guy Maddin and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, two borers extraordinaire in The MacMahonian book, didn´t feel inappropriate.
Be all that as may, the litmus test for the irredeemably boring film is projection time spent struggling to ignore kidney pain and daydreaming the time away as one stares blankly at the screen as if it were a wall, my recollection of the mercifully, if insufficiently, short (77 minutes) Independencia.